Sir, I am just a Kid.

I heard the commotion coming down the corridor outside my office and instinctively knew that something interesting was coming my way.  The giveaway was the raised voice of an irate teacher berating a boy.  He was informing the unfortunate miscreant in no uncertain term that he was indisputably on direct course for a reformatory followed rapidly by a trip to Pollsmoor Prison.   I sighed and waited for the onslaught at my door.

The sight which appeared could have been used in any text book picture on adolescent behaviour. The caption underneath would have read: ‘Teacher with steam coming out of his ears with sullen boy in tow.’  The boy’s face was classic – glowering indignation mixed with surly resentment. Recriminations and accusations were flowing from both sides.  It was immediately apparent that this was destined to be a lengthy process.  Wynberg’s version of the Codessa talks.

Tactfully I suggested that the teacher return to his class where 30 boys would be better served by having a teacher. The boy was clearly in no mood for a chat – so I sent him to sit on the bench in the corridor outside and carried on with my work.  About 15 minutes later, I walked past him on my way to teach a class.  He did not meet my gaze and was defiantly staring at the wall opposite.

‘Go and fetch your case,’ I said to him. ‘You are definitely not going into any class in that mood.’

When I returned an hour later, he was writing on a pad.  ‘Can I go out to break now?’ he asked as if nothing had happened.

‘Definitely not,’ I replied.  ‘It is in the rules of the school that sulking boys are not allowed to have a break.’  I then disappeared into my office before he could think of a reply.

Sometime later there was a knock on my door.  Without a word, he came in and handed me a note.  In fact, it was a two page letter.  The first page was standard schoolboy fare of how unfairly he had been treated, but it was the final paragraph which caught my eye.
‘Sir, I am only a kid,’ he had written.  ‘Surely kids are allowed to make mistakes?’

Wow! That was powerful stuff.  It called for a walk – so off we went to wander around the fields. He was still raw.

‘Why do teachers think that they can never make mistakes?’  he asked after a while, clearly still nursing some residual outrage.  Rather than improve his jaundiced view of the teaching profession – and by extension, the entire adult world - I decided to keep the conversation initially focussed on him.

By the time we returned from our wanderings, we had agreed that he could (just possibly) have handled the earlier situation better.  He suggested of his own accord, that another letter was called for, this time to the teacher himself.  We agreed that this missive would not contain the lengthy diatribe about how unfairly he had been treated.

This was duly done but not before I had also reminded the teacher that fourteen year olds deserved second chances.  And so the matter was happily concluded.

He had set my train of thought going.  ‘I am only a kid, surely I am allowed to make mistakes?’  How right he was.  Surely school is just the place to make mistakes as schools are supposed to be safe havens where boundaries can be tested?  If boys can’t make mistakes at school, then where and when in life CAN they make mistakes?

I informed him on our walk that adults DO make mistakes but they invariably have more serious consequences than sitting on a bench writing letters.  They don’t all have happy endings.

I told him about an overseas tour I once organised when I was teaching at Plumstead High School.  I had organised it as a cultural tour of Europe with four teachers accompanying the pupils.  I instructed the tour party up front that I was not allowing them to take responsibility for looking after their own passports, flight tickets and travellers’ cheques. 

‘I know you lot all too well,’ I pompously  advised them. ‘After you have gone through emigration at Cape Town Airport, you will hand everything to me and I will keep them safe in my bag.’   Prospur Travel Agency had given me a bag for this purpose.  From bitter experience, I knew only too well  that  someone would leave a passport on the plane or  travellers’ cheques lying around the hotel room.  The last thing I wanted was to be running around embassies and banks in Europe trying to replace these items.

We flew from Cape Town to Paris on Air France on a daylight flight arriving at our destination late in the evening.   I handed over the documentation they needed to ensure entrance to Paris and duly collected it again in the arrivals area.   Clyde Broster, one of the teachers, went off to secure taxis for our group while I took my precious bag to the Bureau de Change to change some travellers cheques for French francs (this trip was well before the advent of the Euro).

With my francs carefully stashed in my wallet, I accompanied the excited group through the streets of Paris to our hotel.  On our arrival, I persuaded them, with some difficulty, that an early first night was a far better idea than hitting the bright lights of the Champs Elysees.  However, it was only after midnight that we all retired for the night.

City of Light ... sleeping

I had only slept an hour before I woke up knowing something was wrong.  It nagged me and nagged me until I isolated the cause of my insomnia.  I only remembered bringing two bags with me to my room – and there should have been three.  At two o’clock in the morning, I switched on the light and sure enough, there were only two bags on the floor.  No Prospur bag.  I searched the room.  I stared hopefully in the empty cupboards.  I prayed as I looked hopefully under the bed.  Panic!

I didn’t sleep a wink that night as I ran through my journey from the Bureau de Change, through the airport, on the taxi, into the hotel.  I didn’t know where to start looking.  How do I tell the group? By the time dawn broke, I had worked out my course of action.  Phone taxi  company on the off chance the driver had handed it in – hopefully there would be someone on the phone who could speak English.  Go back to the airport and retrace my steps.  Contact the SA Embassy and informed them that they needed to help us out. Then I remembered that it was 16 December and a public holiday in South Africa which meant the embassy would be closed.  It was clearly destined to be one of those days.

I went down to breakfast in a daze.  I was white as a sheet. 

‘What is the matter with you?’ asked Roger Smith, one of the teachers.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I muttered truthfully.  I couldn’t face telling anyone at this point – not after my dogmatic assurance of their incompetence before we left!  A number of the tour party came to my table asking for the travellers cheques so that they could cash them and be ready for the day’s excursions.

I fudged.  ‘Cashing cheques in a hotel is too expensive,’ I said.  ‘Wait until we find a bank.’

I was sweating and hyperventilating.  The Brosters and Roger Smith were beginning to look at me with concern.  ‘Are you sure you are alright?’

Just then, we were interrupted by a waiter saying that there was a phone call for me from a Mr Errol Pretorius in the hotel foyer.

‘Not now, Errol, this is not a good time,’ I barked down the phone.  Errol, a young Wynberg teacher, had been on the same plane and had spent the entire flight trying to chat up our girls.

‘Listen, Boet,’ he said to me.  ‘I was at the Bureau de Change last night at the airport and I found a Prospur bag with your name on it……’

I let out a whoop which probably matched the noise last made in Paris in May 1945.  ‘Don’t move,’ I said. ‘Where are you staying?  I am on my way.’

I charged out of the hotel telling the bemused teachers to occupy the tour party until I returned.  ‘Tell them to plan where we are sight-seeing today,’ I shouted back over my shoulder as I rushed to make my debut on the Paris underground.

My relief, far right, is clearly etched on my face ...

Errol made me pay though.  It later cost me a meal and many beers at a swanky restaurant on the banks of the Seine.  It was worth it.  Every franc.

I never told any of the tour party of my little mishap.  It was my dark secret for the duration of the trip.  Looking back on the photos of that day, I still see the tell-tale signs of stress on my face.  Just imagine, I kept telling myself, how it could have turned out!

‘So you see,’ I told the boy as we finished our walk. ‘We can all make mistakes.  What we do have to ask ourselves is how we could we handled it better and what we have learnt from the experience.’

At this point it was clearly going over his head.  His contretemps with his teacher was long forgotten. He now had a juicy story to tell his mates.  I could just imagine the version that was destined to be told round the supper table at home that night.

I am just a teacher.  Surely I can make mistakes too?